


Ars Poetica

by superblackmarket



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon, metaphor extravaganza, through the ages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:01:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,348
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26158462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: “Excuse me if this is condescending,” Yusuf said, “but it is fascinating to me that you can’t take a compliment.”Nicolò’s extraordinary eyes—likened to the ravishing waters of the Mediterranean—were wide and guileless. “Forgive me,” he said, in his formal, halting Arabic. “Give it to me again and I shall accept it this time.”
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 187
Kudos: 1370





	Ars Poetica

**i. Aleppo, 1106**

“Excuse me if this is condescending,” Yusuf said, “but it is _fascinating_ to me that you can’t take a compliment.”

Nicolò’s extraordinary eyes—likened to the ravishing waters of the Mediterranean—were wide and guileless. “Forgive me,” he said, in his formal, halting Arabic. “Give it to me again and I shall accept it this time.”

Yusuf stroked Nicolò’s sweaty hair off his brow. “No no no I don’t mean—I’m just observing your habits. Is that okay? Because all this time, I’ve been thinking, am I allowed to tell this man something good about himself? Or will he take up his sword and run me through again, despite the futility of the exercise?”

Nicolò sat up on the bed and crossed his legs. Despite the fact that he was naked, and that his hair stood up in odd spikes from Yusuf’s fingers, he had a quiet sort of dignity about him. “In order to take a compliment, you must have somewhere to keep it inside of you,” he said. “A… hollow room, perhaps? And that room is, for me, very small.”

Yusuf frowned at him. “The room inside of you is too small for a compliment?”

“I need my own language to explain myself,” Nicolò said, and switched to Zeneize, speaking slowly so that Yusuf might understand. “Your compliment, it was… very beautiful. Like something out of Psalms. I didn’t want to take it because I wouldn’t have room for such a lovely thing inside of me. And so I thought, if I just let it hang there, between your lips and my ears, if I didn’t take it, it would stay in the air until it dissolved. But at least it would live a little longer.”

Yusuf laughed out loud, surprised and delighted. “Subhanallah, Nicolò, what a thing to say! That was fucking stupendous, you talk like a poet.”

“If you think so,” Nicolò said, uncertainly, and Yusuf sat up too and cradled Nicolò’s face between his palms.

“I am heartbroken about the small room inside of you.”

“I didn’t mean to, ah, to break anything,” Nicolò told him, so earnestly that Yusuf had no choice but to close the short distance between them and kiss him. He pressed his closed lips to Nicolò’s, dry and chaste, and paused there. He wondered if Nicolò wanted him to do it again, the way he had done it before, but maybe that would be over-bold? His hesitation was swept away by the warmth of Nicolò’s breath and the softness of his lips and the strands of his hair brushing across Yusuf’s cheek; Yusuf embraced him, teasing Nicolò’s mouth open once more beneath his own. Nicolò’s whole body shuddered, and he grabbed Yusuf back just as tightly, his fingers splayed against Yusuf’s shoulder blades, their mouths locked together until they both gasped for breath.

“It’s nice,” Yusuf panted, dropping his forehead down to rest on Nicolò’s shoulder. “I mean, it’s nice being heartbroken sometimes. But you break my heart so casually, Nico, with the things you say about yourself.”

Nicolò did not reply, simply danced his fingertips up and down Yusuf’s spine like he was counting vertebrae.

“This might be presumptuous of me, but all I want right now is to make that little hollow room inside of you bigger.”

Nicolò snorted. “Is that an innuendo?”

“ _No_!” Yusuf exclaimed.

“Because if so, I would say that you already—”

“It was absolutely _not_ an innuendo,” Yusuf huffed. “I was just running with your poetic simile, and I meant it sincerely. All I want in the world is to make your hollow room bigger so you will one day have the capacity to accept all the compliments I intend to bestow on you.”

“That can’t be _all_ you want,” Nicolò said skeptically, and Yusuf couldn’t decide if he was playing the fool or just extremely literal in his conversation now that they had returned to Arabic.

“Well, no, of course not,” he replied. “I would like to eat a decent tagine again. I would like a proper bath. I would like the rest of your fucking Franks to get back on their fucking horses and fuck off back to the benighted lands from whence they came, but that doesn’t seem very likely to happen now, does it?”

“Is there anything else?” Nicolò inquired. All solicitousness and large, ingenuous eyes—very effective, for a priest in the habit of taking confessions. But utterly distracting to a man besotted with their owner.

“I want… well, there are many things that I want, but they aren’t coming to mind at the moment. You have scattered me, Nicolò, like stars across… across…” Yusuf trailed off, contemplating the best way to complete his metaphor. _Across the heavenly firmament? Across the majestical roof?_

“Like stars across the blanket of the sky?” Nicolò proposed.

“That’s it!” Yusuf said, pleased. Himself prone to grandiose language, he appreciated the simplicity of Nicolò’s offering. “Like stars across the blanket of the sky. You took the words right out of my mouth.”

“I didn’t mean to take them without asking. I can put them back, if you like,” Nicolò said.

“Oh, no I—” Yusuf realized that Nicolò was joking. He laughed and shook his head. “I am always caught by surprise when you demonstrate a sense of humor, Padre.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Nicolò suggested, shoving him back into the mattress.

“Well, what I’m really asking for is the chance to do _this_ a second time,” he admitted, gesturing between their bodies. He was hard again, and he could see Nicolò was too, but he didn’t want to presume. “And perhaps the other way around, if that suits you?” 

Nicolò leaned over him, arms poised above his head like a human proscenium arch, crossed wrists resting on the pillow. “You would like for me to fuck you,” he said musingly, and dipped his pelvis down in an easy, graceful movement to slide against Yusuf’s groin. And again. Slowly, steadily, until Yusuf’s breathing grew shallower and quicker. Nicolò lowered an arm, took Yusuf’s hand, and somewhat clumsily placed it back on his own hip; Yusuf got the hint, fingertips running idly over the prominent hipbone before he slid both hands to Nicolò’s backside. Every last bit of Nicolò’s skin felt sensational and he really did have the loveliest—

His nails sank in and he bucked against Nicolò without any restraint, trying somehow to pull himself bodily into the heat and smooth sweep of his flesh, and Nicolò was pushing back, plastering himself to Yusuf like a second skin. Gasps and murmurs of pleasure were exchanged between them as they kissed messily. Then Nicolò broke off and raised his head, eyes glittering, a red flush appearing along his cheekbones.

“Turn around,” he whispered, actually doing a little circular motion with his fingers as if the concept required demonstration.

Yusuf obeyed, despite his impulse to laugh, and rolled onto his stomach. He felt Nicolò land rapid, scattershot kisses on his shoulder blades, the small of his back, the inside of a thigh. Then there was a thoughtful-seeming pause, as Nicolò’s hands roamed southward. A fingertip traveled between his buttocks, stroking there, not making the least attempt to slip inside him, and Yusuf was about to remind Nicolò of the bottle of oil sitting on the bedside table when the finger was replaced by Nicolò’s tongue.

Yusuf couldn’t believe the fucking priest had one-upped him yet again. He would repay Nicolò in kind, he would—… Coherent thought fled as Nicolò held him wide apart and licked at him feverishly. His whole body seized up hot and tight, and he was rutting into the mattress and arching back to open himself up even wider as the blue-eyed invader ate him alive.

“Don’t stop, Nico,” he rasped, his voice thin and wrung out like a dishrag.

Nicolò—cruel contrarian—stopped.

Yusuf started to curse him, but then he, too, heard the shouting on the street below, the reverberant clang of metal on metal. He turned over and caught Nicolò by the elbow before he could go to the window to investigate. “Don’t,” he said firmly. “The Seljuqs are warring amongst themselves. We don’t need to get involved.”

Nicolò allowed himself to be pulled back to the bed. He curled onto his side, toes pressed lightly against Yusuf’s shin, and ran a hand along the back of his thigh. “Aleppo is an angry city,” he remarked.

“The emirs are brothers, it will be a fight to the death.” Yusuf didn’t really care one way or another. He and Nicolò were merely passing through Aleppo on their way north to Anatolia, and at this moment, all he cared about was getting Nicolò’s mouth back where it had been.

“You have traveled more widely than I,” said Nicolò. He tensed as the clamor in the street hit a new crescendo, which had the effect of making his muscles ripple and flex under Yusuf’s approving eye. “In other cities, did it feel like people were angry all the time?”

“Everyone is angry. There are only different kinds of anger. It’s like, hmmm…” Yusuf ran a finger along the bridge Nicolò’s nose. “It’s like wine,” he decided. “Some years are angrier than others. Some places produce anger that is more sweet or more bitter or more packed with dirt. Some anger has been trapped in barrels for many years. And then when it is let out and swallowed, it is anger so pure and so full that it makes whole empires drunk in an instant. There have been many places and moments just like this, I’m sure. Nicolò, please…”

Nicolò reached for the oil.  
  
  
 **ii. Hindu Kush, 1222**

Despite their combined knowledge of the Ibrahimic religions, they never resolved the theological implications of their immortality. It was a sticking point for them at first, but they’d mostly stopped worrying about it by the time Andromache and Quynh found them. Andromache, they learned, had been worshiped as a god across many different cultures, and Quynh had also been elevated into select pantheons. “What about you two?” Quynh asked.

Yusuf exchanged a glance with Nicolò. They had begun the tender process of making love, and only a half-drawn curtain separated them from Andromache and Quynh in the tent they shared. Nicolò had two fingers inside of him and there was a simmering heat low in his belly, familiar and deeply comforting. Yusuf didn’t think he was capable of speech right now.

“No,” Nicolò replied. “Gods are… things people believe in. No one has ever believed in us.”

They were camped high in the snowy mountains of Afghanistan with Genghis Khan’s army. Earlier that day, the great Khan had received the Taoist master Qiu Chuji in the Imperial Pavilion and asked him if he had brought the medicine of immortality with him. Andromache, Quynh, Nicolò, and Yusuf had been granted the privilege of listening in on the conversation, and four pairs of eyebrows shot up at the Khan’s question. When Qiu Chuji replied that there was no such thing as a medicine of immortality but that life could be extended through abstinence, four smiles were hastily concealed. Yusuf thought the Khan might kill Qiu Chuji for his answer, but the Emperor merely thanked him for his honestly, appointed him master of all monks in China, and decreed that from henceforth Qiu Chuji should be called “The Immortal.”

Yusuf wondered what that made the four of them.

“Perhaps we are more than gods,” Quynh mused. “Gods have come and gone; there have been thousands of them. But we have never left.”

“Lykon.” That was Andromache’s voice, ragged across the two syllables. “Lykon left.”

Nicolò pushed his fingers a bit further, and a shiver traveled along the length of Yusuf’s spine.

“Maybe he lacked our staying power,” Quynh said.

Nicolò moved his wet, slippery fingers back and forth, steady and soothing. But his brow was furrowed, and Yusuf could see that this conversation made him uneasy. They both still prayed, though not with the same consistency and conviction as they had a century ago—more for the comfort of the ritual, despite the laughter it occasioned from Andromache and Quynh. But releasing themselves from the tenets of organized religion did not mean they had any business appointing themselves ministers of fate in the old prophets’ place, and neither Yusuf nor Nicolò enjoyed it when Andromache and Quynh flirted with divinity. 

Nicolò curled his fingertips and touched spots that made Yusuf stifle a moan and bear down as if he could keep Nicolò inside him forever. “There have been innumerable gods that people have held above their heads like canopies to protect them from the rain,” he called out breathlessly. “But I like to think that the power we answer to is— _yes,_ Nico, yes—more like the rain itself.”

There was a ripple of laughter from the other side of the curtain.

“Someone is definitely getting fucked,” Andromache remarked. “Which do you think it is?”

Yusuf opened his mouth to answer _me_ , but then Nicolò was grabbing at him, kissing, biting, and scratching; fumbling with the oil, spilling some on the blankets. And when Nicolò entered him with practiced ease divine unto itself, Yusuf forgot all about rainy gods and the women listening on the other side of the curtain.  
  
  
 **iii. Dover, 1531**

A peregrine falcon circled high above the white cliffs. Yusuf and Nicolò sat with Andromache between them, shivering as one despite the blanket around their shoulders. They were all of them naked, waiting for their clothes to dry, so they might put them on again and continue the search on the next boat to Calais.

Andromache was keening softly, like a wounded animal. Her grief was so great and so terrible that Yusuf felt utterly helpless in her presence. He was no more capable of offering comfort than he was of assuaging his newfound fear that a similar fate might one day befall Nicolò and himself. He had not even considered the possibility, not until Quynh had been ripped from their midst.

Now he thought of nothing else.

Nicolò’s heart was not so selfish. He was rocking with Andromache, bringing her head down to rest on his shoulder. “I have always trusted that we were made for something bright,” he said. “We have loved each other and kept each other whole. Do not give up hope, Andromache.”

It alarmed Yusuf, how fragile Andromache had become. Her body against his felt no more substantial than the hollow bones of a bird.

“There are so many things that I miss,” she whispered. “I miss watching the old gods stitch the constellations together, hearing the sound of giants dancing in the hills… There is no more magic anymore, no more mystery, because humans have destroyed everything that was divine and beautiful.”

Yusuf looked at Nicolò over her bent head. Andromache had spent the centuries of their acquaintance maintaining that there were no such things as gods and giants, that magic and mystery were in the eye of the beholder and they were better off beholding the world without them.

“I trust that those things being gone will amount to something else,” Nicolò said. His fingers found Yusuf’s side and pinched; Yusuf realized he was requesting backup.

“The empty craters in every century will all be filled one day,” he offered, his words more tentative than usual. He remembered the hollow room that Nicolò had described inside himself, a room too small to accommodate an offhand compliment about his eyes. “And not just with cruelty and malice, but with meaning that we ourselves have poured into them. And we will never give up searching.”  
  
  
 **iv. Brussels, 1825**

The upside of Sebastien coming home sloshed was that they always heard him coming. Nicolò had been about to sit on Yusuf’s cock and ride him to oblivion and back; now they picked themselves up off the rug, adjusted their clothes, and sat primly on the settee with books opened at random.

Not a moment too soon.

Sebastien staggered through the door, bottle in hand, and blinked at them owlishly. “Josef. Nicolas. You’re home.”

“Hello, brother,” Yusuf said, as genially as he could manage, given the circumstances.

“Have you just been sitting there?” Sebastien demanded.

“Yep,” Yusuf said. 

“That sounds like a shitty time.”

“Are you all right?” Nicolò asked.

“I’ve had enough scotch to beach a whale,” Sebastien said, “so yes, I suppose I am.”

“…I’m glad you had a pleasant evening,” said Nicolò. 

“Did I say it was pleasant? I went out drinking with our Flemish spy, and let me tell you, I yearn above all else to squeeze his throat between my fingers and watch his head pop off like a champagne cork. But in fairness to him, I feel that way about everyone.” Sebastien flung himself down on the rug and stared moodily into the fire. “Immortality, eh? I never dreamt such honor myself, being one of four little pricks dancing around the asshole of history, looking for a way in.”

Yusuf laughed in spite of himself.

“This is your fault, you know,” Nicolò told him.

“How is this my fault?”

“The way he speaks.”

“So crudely? Surely that’s Andromache’s influence, not mine.”

“No, the images. In the past few minutes alone, he’s given us a whale, a bottle of champagne, and the asshole of history. Spend any length of time around you, my beloved, and we all start talking in colorful metaphors.” Nicolò’s eyes glinted with mirth. “I fell headfirst into metaphor the first time we made love, do you remember?”

Sebastien made a retching sound, and Yusuf had jumped to his assistance before he realized the Frenchman was doing it for effect, not actually voiding his liquor.

“Oh, grow up,” he snapped. “You’ve had years to get used to us now.”

Wherever they traveled, Sebastien brought his anger with them, like a barrel full of sour grapes, and Yusuf was frankly sick of it.

Nicolò, however, opted for compassion. “You know you can talk to us,” he reminded the newest member of their family.

Yusuf offered nothing; Nicolò elbowed him.

“You can,” he said, grudging it.

Nicolò leaned forward, eyes intent on Sebastien. “No more bullshit, okay? I wish you would unveil your heart to us, and then perhaps—”

“I hate it when you go priest on me. Talk like a fucking person, would you?” the Frenchman growled, and Yusuf didn’t care for his tone.

“Being drunk,” he said sharply, “is no excuse for being a cunt.”

Nicolò rapped his knuckles against Yusuf’s knee reprovingly. “He’s still grieving,” he said in Arabic, a language Sebastien had yet to demonstrate any interest in learning, and just as well, too, Yusuf thought. “He can shout at me if he needs to, there’s no harm done.”

“We are who we are,” Sebastien said philosophically, “and we’re each of us fucked up. I’m the fucked up angry one, and you’re the fucked up happy ones. Isn’t it nice to be a round peg in a round hole? No wonder you like to take turns with it.”

“I’ll pop _his_ head off like a champagne cork,” Yusuf mumbled in Italian.

“One of you is going to lose his immortality first. Tell me, Père Nicolas, what will you do if he goes before you?”

“Sebastien,” Nicolò said, and a note of warning had crept into his voice, “being drunk is no excuse for being a cunt.”

“Do you look into his eyes and see the holes they will be someday? Two holes in bleached white bone for you to cry into? And then I’ll have to scrape your soul off the floor like fucking hummus, because at that point Andrée will probably be dead too, and then—then and only then, Nicolas—I will unveil my heart to you.”

Yusuf—for lack of a better metaphor—saw red.

When the crimson wave had receded, he discovered himself on the floor beside Sebastien, who was very clearly dead, with his neck at an odd angle. Yusuf didn’t recall snapping it, but he must have done, because Nicolò was kneeling on the other side of the body, his knife sticking out of Sebastien’s chest.

“Great minds,” Nicolò said dryly.

Yusuf stared blindly at the dead Frenchman, quite unable to speak.

_One of you is going to die first._

Yusuf would rip every last star from the sky before he let that happen.

There was a sickening crunch as Sebastien’s spinal column reattached itself to the base of his skull. Indifferent to the resurrection taking place, Nicolò leaned over him to cradle Yusuf’s cheek in his hand. “We go together,” he said firmly. “We share a single destiny. When we leave, it will be together.”

Sebastien twitched and emitted a pitiful groan. Nicolò wrapped his fingers around the hilt of his blade. 

“Hold still,” he admonished, “or I will make this hurt like a motherbitch.”  
  
  
 **v. Mumbai, 2017**

“Sometimes I hate you,” Andromache said, watching Yusuf press a kiss to Nicolò’s palm and curl his fingers around it. 

Booker chuckled. “How was your date, boss?”

“It wasn’t a date,” Yusuf intervened hastily, off the thunderous expression on Andromache’s face. “A date is a fruit, small, sweet, and rare. Andy was meeting with a potential client.”

“Pradeep—and yes, he will be engaging our services—is a hairy, noisy tube of meat,” Andy said. “How the hell did he even find us, Book?”

“Craigslist.” Booker took a swig from his flask.

“You did _not_ advertise us on Craigslist!” Yusuf exclaimed. 

“Don’t worry, Joe, it was very well encrypted,” Booker assured him.

Yusuf glowered. He knew it was medieval of him to dislike things he didn’t understand, but—

“I didn’t realize Craiglist still existed,” Nicky, his Nicolò, said.

“Yeah, it’s where I get most of our surveillance equipment.”

“I have always wondered—who is Craig?” Nicolò came to stand behind Yusuf’s chair and wrapped his arms around him, resting his chin on his shoulder. “Is he a god? I imagine him as a small, angry internet god with two cloven hooves he bought from Ikea—”

“Do we have any of that vindaloo from—whenever we had the vindaloo?” Andy interrupted.

“You ate it this morning,” Nicky reminded her. “But I could—”

“Don’t bother, I’m going back out anyway. Book, you coming?”

“Definitely,” Sebastien said, and the pair of them disappeared into the night.

Yusuf tilted his head back to look at Nicolò; Nicolò came round the chair to straddle his lap.

“Are they getting worse, or are we?” he asked.

“Both?” Yusuf hedged. “But I do feel that loving you more with every passing year is a better use of immortality than attempting to destroy as many livers as possible.”

“Really, you love me more? Is such a thing possible?” Nicky nudged Yusuf’s nose with his own.

“Allow me to show you,” Yusuf offered, ever the gentleman.  
  
  
 **vi. Aleppo, 1106, cont.**

Nicolò’s skin was as sweat slicked as his own. Yusuf couldn’t talk anymore, couldn’t think or beg or move of his own volition. He clenched around Nicolò’s cock deep inside him and bucked up into the fingers encircling his own; then he couldn’t do anything but let sensation tear through him until he came, all over Nicolò’s hand, with a long, choked moan. He wasn’t himself anymore, he was Nicolò’s to use, to use up, all he wanted to do was lie here quietly as Nicolò thrust inside him and grunted with pleasure and shook from head to foot and clutched his shoulders too tightly, leaving finger-shaped bruises that healed in the same second. Nicolò made a noise that started as an apology but suddenly became a high, swiftly stifled cry, and collapsed atop Yusuf’s body.

They lay there for several minutes, still half-conjoined. Breath and sensibility returned slowly; Nicolò eased himself down by Yusuf’s side. For once in his life, Yusuf couldn’t think of anything to say, so he took Nicolò’s face in his hands and kissed his forehead and his temples, nibbled at his ear until Nicolò laughed and batted him away. His batting hand gentled, then stroked through Yusuf’s sweat-matted curls, stroked, slowed, and stopped. They rested silently.

At last Yusuf shuffled forward to kiss Nicolò’s forehead again. “You,” he said, “are a magnificent lover.”

Nicolò’s lashes fluttered.

“Say ‘thank you,’ Nico,” Yusuf instructed.

“How did you feel about the—… what I did with my tongue?” Nicolò asked instead.

“My world cracked open and filled with starlight,” Yusuf said. “It was extraordinary. And to think you were once a priest.”

“It wasn’t something that I planned to do,” Nicolò demurred. “I merely followed an impulse of the moment.”

“As I said, you are a magnificent lover.” Yusuf looked at him meaningfully.

“I… thank you.” Nicolò’s throat bobbed nervously as he swallowed.

“Are you afraid of this?” he asked, expecting a sharp retort to the contrary, but Nicolò nodded.

“Oh, yes,” he said, smiling faintly. “I am. Very scared.”

“Why?”

“It is just so… much, is it not? Us and eternity. Do I make you happy, Yusuf?”

“Completely, catastrophically, world-endingly happy,” Yusuf said. “I have not merely fallen in love, Nicolò; I have fucking plummeted. I want to spend the rest of eternity filling that room of yours until it is larger than the cosmos itself.”

Nicolò’s smile was devastatingly beautiful. “There was much that was missing from me, before we embarked on this journey together. Little pieces that I took out, to make room for God or because I thought there was no place for them. But now I am finding that I would rather fill that space with you.”

“Is that an innuendo?” Yusuf whispered, so deliriously in love with the man in his arms that he thought he might burst or at least levitate.

“It was, and in a few minutes I will be ready for you to fuck me again,” Nicolò said.

Yusuf laughed. “For a man so recently a priest, you do say ‘fuck’ a lot.”

“Thank you,” Nicolò said. “I will take that as a compliment.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is a pretty perfunctory hop skip and a jump through time, but the anecdote about Genghis Khan does have a basis in historical record. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading! I love to hear from you.


End file.
